In despair over the possible re-election of Abraham Lincoln, Susan had joined Henry and Elizabeth Stanton in stirring up sentiment for John C. Fremont. Abolitionists were sharply divided in this presidential campaign. Garrison and Phillips disagreed on the course of action, Garrison coming out definitely for Lincoln in the _Liberator_, while Phillips declared himself emphatically against four more years of Lincoln. Susan, the Stantons, and Parker Pillsbury were among those siding with Phillips because they feared premature reconstruction under Lincoln. They cited Lincoln's Amnesty Proclamation as an example of his leniency toward the rebels. They saw danger in leaving free Negroes under the control of southerners embittered by war, and called for Negro suffrage as the only protection against oppressive laws. They opposed the readmission of Louisiana without the enfranchisement of Negroes. Lincoln, they knew, favored the extension of suffrage only to literate Negroes and to those who had served in the military forces. In fact, Lincoln held back while they wanted to go ahead under full steam and they looked to Fremont to lead them. Following the presidential campaign anxiously from Rochester, Susan wrote Mrs. Stanton, "I am starving for a full talk with somebody posted, not merely pitted for Lincoln...." The persistent cry of the _Liberator_ and the _Antislavery Standard_ to re-elect Lincoln and not to swap horses in midstream did not ring true to her. "We read no more of the good old doctrine 'of two evils choose neither,'" she wrote Anna E. Dickinson. She confessed to Anna, "It is only safe to seek and act the truth and to profess confidence in Lincoln would be a lie in me."[155] As the war dragged on through the summer without decisive victories for the North, Lincoln's prospects looked bleak, and to her dismay, Susan saw the chances improving for McClellan, the candidate of the northern Democrats who wanted to end the war, leave slavery alone, and conciliate the South. The whole picture changed, however, with the capture of Atlanta by General Sherman in September. The people's confidence in Lincoln revived and Fremont withdrew from the contest. One by one the anti-Lincoln abolitionists were converted; and Susan, anxiously waiting for word from Mrs. Stanton, was relieved to learn that she was not one of them, nor was Wendell Phillips whose judgment and vision both of them valued above that of any other man. With approval she read these lines which Phillips had just written Mrs. Stanton, "I would cut off both hands before doing anything to aid Mac's [McClellan's] election. I would cut oft my right hand before doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln's election. I wholly distrust his fitness to settle this thing and indeed his purpose."[156]